I'm vacillating between "blackmail and control" versus "one has to be involved in nefarious acts to even get to the office in the first place". I
don't suppose they are mutually exclusive either, however, and I like the answers given by other posters as well.

What kinds of questions do you propose? I'm pretty sure that most politicians that get to the point where they are vying for a presidential position
have fine tuned the art of consummate lying and could probably pass a polygraph.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that the president doesn't have that high of a clearance level.

Well with certain exceptions I would hold everything a politician said to the standards that you would in a court of law.
Lying would be considered perjury.

Also end of every term I would make all politicians face a jury in a civil court to decide on if in there office they did there job of representing
there constituents. Failure of this would have seen striped of there pension and barred from public office.

I am guessing the cost of the machines are pretty high. Maybe each time they have tried to hook up a candidate to a polygraph, the machine just
overloaded and blew up. So they decided to skip that part.

Erm, no, Polygraphing has been proven to be worthless in pretty much every sensible nation and state. It's entirely unreliable and has never once been
proven to be a worthwhile means to confirm truth.

Everyone in positions of government go through security clearance, I don't believe politicians are exempt from this. You can guarantee that the CIA
have a file on every serving politician of note in the US, and this would include all those running for the highest levels of office.

Just because you don't see the clearance doesn't mean they are not checked, monitored, investigated and cleared.

Do you really think your government doesn't monitor politicians for security against infiltration from unfriendly nations, for example? They do this
for corporations all the time, what makes you think they don't check on politicians in the same way?

And a politician running for the highest office in the country doesn't just appear from nowhere, they would have been on the radar of the security
services for years prior to that.

?Why don't we require more rigorous qualifications for our elected officials. They handle see and overseas sensitive material everyday it would
only make sense to put them through the same process everyone they are working with goes through

People that run things are very carefully screened. They have to be really good liars, really good pretenders, and really good at diverting attention
towards or away prefab stories for mass consumption. Oratory skills a plus, but mostly dedicated, stone cold liars.

Basically because the constitutional requirements for running for president are basic, they are spelled out pretty openly, and because we also have
the 4th Amendment.

Now, if the parties wanted to do that to their candidates on their own--being private organizations--and then made the results public, that'd be fine,
but I think making something like a polygraph (something that is easy enough to fool that they are not admissible as evidence in court) a mandatory
step at the federal level in running for president is ridiculous.

But I get why you would like to see something like that happen--hell, it'd probably knock out 99% of all professional politicians and we'd get some
real people in office.

I came across an FBI interview a long time ago in regards to why they do not do background checks on them .

According to them the FBI stance was that its up to the American people to decide who they want to be their president. They didn't want the power to
overturn or muddy those waters by having that authority.

Sounds great but full of BS too me .

The real reason is likely more in line with the fact that all presidential candidates are selected by the Oligarch which streamlines the the DNC and
GOP candidate pool.

In other words the presidential candidates is one of their own and the rules don't apply to them nor do they like to be questioned or investigated.

They don't. Had an SCI and was PRP qualified for a large part of my adult life and never saw a polygraph. And the vetting done on Candidates by
their own party, the opposition party, the media and dozens of watchdog groups is more thorough than any background check that would be done. And as
we have only had 43 people in history hold the office it has never been an issue.

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